‘Dubliners’ is a collection of short stories written by the modern day literary rebel,
James Joyce. He sketches the picture of Dublin as he saw it dirty, dingy but full of throbbing life. He paints a portrait of the denizens of the city of his birth, from the first story “The Sisters” in which a young boy encounters the city of death to the haunting final story, “The Dead”. This collection of fifteen stories is an absolute realistic reflection of “dear dirty Dublin” and, as Joyce himself said, a window through which his countrymen could get “one good look at themselves”.
Dubliners mirrors the poverty stricken years of Joyce’s early exile. One could judge the stories as semi- autobiographical. A few of the stories bristles with the irritations of marriage in cramped quarters (a close reflection of his life with Nora, though they were never married as Joyce rejected the institution of marriage due to his protest against the Roman Catholic church). “A Little Cloud” written some months after the birth of his son manifests the frustration of new parenthood as the husband, blighted in his ambitions, surrenders first place in his wife’s affection to his son. Into the stories Joyce also wove images of his adolescence as in “An Encounter” and “Clay”.
Dubliners, however, is no exercise in nostalgia. It is a look back in anger. Joyce portrays his countrymen as drunks, cheats, child batters, boasters, gossips and schemers: all failures, people who are incapable of taking the chances that life offers them and who as in “Araby”, prevent the young from taking theirs.
Joyce’s own favorite story in the Dubliners is “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”. It is a sardonic tale of small time political hacks, men whose devotion to candidates comes second only to their own comfort. The story is a useful read for anyone interested in the troubled state of relation between Ireland and Great Britain today.
“A Mother” is a story of public life. In “Clay” a tiny aging Maria, manager in a laundry kitchen, gropes blindfolded in a party for the ring (marriage). Instead she gets clay (death). “The Dead” is Joyce’s most autobiographical story- an ironic vision of what he might had become had he remained in Ireland. The story relates the tale of the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, is an urbane Dublin teacher with literary pretensions and his love for Gretta and jealousy for her past buried life, when she had been in love with a boy who died young. This leads to magnificently to the main statement of the book: that in Ireland the dead are perfect; the livings are failures.
Dubliners is not a vision of despair, but is the book to take to a desert island; the hundredth reading reveals as many discoveries as the first. Its characters are at the same time intensely Irish and utterly universal. Joyce as a young artist knew exactly what he was doing and the result is this beautifully penned semi-autobiographical work.